Pencil

Dealing with Static Assets

Some files don’t need any special manipulation. We just want to either copy-and-paste the files from our source directory to the output directory, or a straight-forward conversion (e.g. SCSS to CSS) without needing pages and structures and environment variables.

Pencil understands this, and supplies a couple of functions to make this easy. The Hackage documentation has lots of examples. You can also look at the Complex example, which tests all of these scenarios.

If you have a folder of mixed assets like SCSS files and images, you can use loadAndRender:

loadAndRender "assets/"
loadAndRender "profile-pic.jpg"

Convertible files will be converted, but binary files are copy-and-pasted through.

If you have files that you want to render without any conversion, like a Markdown file that you want to keep as Markdown, use passthrough:

passthrough "assets/" >>= render
passthroguh "example.markdown" >>= render

You can also combine these functions with file-path-changing functions like move and rename:

move "assets/example.markdown" <$> passthrough "assets/ex.markdown" >>= render

We use the functor <$> function (i.e. fmap) because passthrough has the type FilePath -> PencilApp Resource.